News

Kodansha's Morning 2 to Serialize Felipe Smith Comic

Starting with its June 21 issue, Kodansha's monthly
Morning 2
magazine will be running a manga created by American artist Felipe Smith. He will also draw the issue's cover and contribute six color pages. New chapters of the story will come out each month.

Smith broke into the manga scene in 2004, when his short story
Manga
was published in Tokyopop's
Rising Stars of Manga, Volume 3
anthology. Tokyopop
then signed him to a three-book contract, the result of which was the semi-autobiographical MBQ
(pictured at right). For its part, Morning 2
has been one of the only publications in Japan that have recently carried non-Japanese comics. In 2007, it publishedKage no Matsuri, which was created by the American artist team of Bikkuri and Rem. Their short story was the grand prize winner of
Kodansha's 1st Morning International Manga Competition. Like Smith's upcoming title,
Kage no Matsuri
also adorned the cover of Morning 2
magazine.

Funimation's new release is primarily for those who have never owned the movie and/or those who also want the original Streamline English dub. Even at 25 years old, though, it still shows clearly why it has long been one of anime's standard-bearer titles.

Zac Bertschy, Hope Chapman and pal of the show Brady Hartel spend an easy, breezy 2 hours chatting up the end of 2013, favorite anime of the year and then it's both Twitter questions and Live Chat questions! Wow!

It's Last Dark's job to clean up Blood-C TV's mess and patch up the damage it did to the franchise at large. That it succeeds is suitably impressive, but that doesn't necessarily make for great filmmaking.

While the Sword Beast sub-arc is far from being a highlight of the series, neither is it anywhere near being a lowlight. It is entertaining enough that slogging through it to get back to the main story is not too tedious.

This basic, bloody story about two friends who take different paths to becoming super-heroes promises some dynamic character interactions but suffers too much from predictability to be sufficiently compelling.